


An Impromptu Christening

by zygodidactyl



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:09:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26784190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zygodidactyl/pseuds/zygodidactyl
Summary: The Ninth house finds a body and a baby.  Nobody who matters is really thrilled about this turn of events.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 39





	An Impromptu Christening

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly written in a weird haze when I couldn't sleep so I'm not really sure where most of it came from. Enjoy some Ninth background fodder who don't exist except in my head and are probably dead by the time anything important happens. Thanks!

In the house of the Ninth, children were reared together for the most part. It was easier that way, and since there were never really more than a handful of the same age group at the same time, it was simple enough to split them into tiny cohorts in school, religion, or otherwise. It also meant that no one nun, devoted brother, or thrall was obligated to spend too much time on childrearing when there are religious rites to perform or chores for them to do. This, Sister Spinarea was perfectly fine with. The small slices of her time which were in fact relegated to  _ ‘the blessed cultivated of the future Tomb Keepers’ _ , not so much.

She was on both construct and ‘blessed cultivation’ duty when it happened, halfway through inspecting a skeleton’s cracked lunate when in the distance there came the distinct clamor of something very large falling down the main shaft. A crunchy sort of sound would be typical, the herald of a construct slipping off a high railing. This is one was wetter somehow. Meatier. 

A voice rang out from the girl squatted down beside her elbow. “That didn’t sound like a construct,” Magda said dumbly. 

There was a pregnant pause in which the Sister considered just continuing with her lesson in skeletal maintenance instead of scraping an some moron off Ninth floor. “Should we...go see what happened?” Magda sounded hesitant, like someone who really  _ really  _ wanted to go see what happened but knew that her minder might not feel the same. 

“Yes,” said Sister Spinarea, in an acidic tone that she hoped belied how deeply she wanted to do the opposite. “I suppose we should.”

*

It wasn’t an idiot teenager at least. In fact, Spinarea wasn’t sure  _ what _ lay in front of her, all orange suit and misplaced limbs. Bits of the suit fluttered from an upper crossing bridge where the falling body had snagged along the way, a bit of force that had not slowed the falling meat missile significantly enough to prevent much injury, not that it would have mattered. The person inside was dead before they even hit the ground.

Removing the helmet revealed the head of a dead woman. Her eyes were wide open and twitching without meaning, her heart still pumping useless blood through a brain that no longer registered anything at all. Moving the rest of the body, it became clear that part of the odd shape was due to a medium sized container strapped to her chest. The object was a sturdy cylinder with a simple screwtop lid, connected to the suit with a hose and when they cracked it open, the top  _ hissed _ with a change in pressure in a way the suit hadn’t. From the container, packed so tightly inside that it probably hadn’t even jostled in the fall, Magda extracted...a baby.

It began crying nearly as soon as its face crested the opening of its odd home, a sound that echoed through the halls of Drearburgh like a headache. 

“It’s a  _ baby _ ,” Magda said, as if in awe of some miracle. Less than 50 words today and the girl had spent half of them stating the obvious. 

“I can hear that,” Spinarea snapped wearily. She set to rolling up her long robe sleeves just a touch, and at least this day would involve an interesting bout of necromancy. As a sworn nun of the Locked Tomb she was no spirit magician, but calling back the spirit of one freshly dead woman ought to be simple enough.

*

By the time Spinarea admitted defeat, Magda had gotten the babe wrapped awkwardly in the folds of her over robe and was shivering slightly with the chill that had to have crept in because of it. The soul was there, sure, but it was difficult to grasp, like trying to pull a fresh bone from a pool of blood and meat. Every time she thought she had a hold of it, it wriggled away again. The thing was wrong somehow, as though the spirit has no handles with which to grasp it, no cracks or chinks to dig fingernails in. 

She wavered, suddenly overcome with exhaustion and Magda attempted to steady her, though it ended up more of a body-check since her hands were also full of gurgling infant. “One of the others came to check on us,” she said by way of a greeting. “I told him to get some of the older Sisters since you looked like you were having trouble.” 

“Thank you,” Spinarea said, and almost meant it. “I’m going to sit down for a moment.”

*

When she came to again, Magda was still next to her, squatting down on her heels again and trying to play peek-a-boo with an infant which is most certainly not old enough to see properly, let alone understand object permanence. Still, the thing gurgled and bubbled and its eyes were a terrifying shade of gold that just served to highlight how very un-Ninth it was. A spattering of nuns and brothers adept had gathered, along with some look-sees shirking work and children looking for something interesting to see. They were split down the middle, half of them actually preparing to summon the soul again, the other half blatantly gossiping about the woman and their newest visitor to the house. 

“Maybe it's an omen." That was one of the younger nuns, the ones that tended to see the hand of the Emperor in anything.

“Boon or bane?”

“Boon! A gift from our Lord to us, and fresh blood in the Ninth.” She sounded very excited about it, and Spinarea decides not to mention the last bit of ‘fresh blood’ that had graced their halls and cavalier primary. She just thought it very sternly. 

“Bah,” spat the Marshall, rumbling around from the back of the small crowd. “Another mouth to feed, and milk just as we wean the last in the crèche off it. I say we throw it back where it came from, soon as we find out from the body.” He had a point, stingy as it was. The Ninth was scraping along as it was, a larger share than usual still growing and needing new robes every time anybody turned about. 

“A blessing, if it adds new bones to my classes,” creaked out a senior nun. “I could use another youngling to take down my theorem notes before I pass on.” She at least had set out a bowl of fresh blood for the ghost, more than some of their adepts seemed to be doing.

Sister Spinarea finally stood up, and immediately felt dizzy in the head again. Looking around did not reveal every experienced necromancer the Ninth had, but it would do for corralling one wiley soul out for some answers. 

“It was probably born interstellar,” someone called from the back of the black mass. 

“Interstellar, by a dying mother,” Magda said quickly, oddly defensive. Then, in a quieter voice, “There’s a chance.” She was right, this time. There  _ was _ a chance the little thing was a necromancer, something their creche was sorely in need of. It wasn’t a  _ good  _ chance by any means, but the Ninth didn’t operate on good chances on the best of days. Either way though, the discussion was getting in the way of their window with the spirit, every second that ticked away was another second for it to cross the River farther away than anybody but the Fifth could call to them.

“Enough!” She snapped like a cracking whip, as much force behind her voice as she could muster. “This soul is stubborn and we are wasting time.”

The other necromancers nodded and murmured with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and they began their work. 

The feeling of the soul hadn’t changed with some time to stew on its own death, it still slipped and slid from a necromantic grasp. The only real difference was that this time there were more hands reaching and failing. The effect was something like a child’s ball game, the soul pinging around between them wildly, bouncing off into a random direction every time someone reached for it. Every connection between her metaphysical hand and the soul was accompanied by the aftertaste of pure, unadulterated rage, like the dying woman had been so saturated with it that it left her spirit dripping.

And with that realization, Spinarea had her thread. If there was nothing else to hold on to, no personal relationship or treasured object, strong emotion might work in its stead. So the next time the soul was wrangled down towards her, she took the opportunity to focus  _ hard  _ on that rage and anger, the acrid tang of it on her tongue. It hooked on something, like a thread through cloth, and before the soul could untangle itself from her hook Spinarea  _ pulled. _

An instant or an hour later, it worked. She jolted back into her body, hair matted with blood and sweat, and even her ears felt stoppered up with it. There wasn’t time to take stock of anyone else though, because as soon as her eyes opened back up she realized the spirit stood in front of them.

The woman appeared as a full body apparition, surprisingly solid, if wispy around the edges. Her hair was pulled back into two tight braids hugging her skull, small damp curls escaping at the temples and the turns of the plaits. She wore the same jumpsuit they found her in forever ago, and her chest heaved with breath she no longer needed to take. Most strikingly of all, her face was a mask of pure rage, the kind of emotion that makes a revenant fit to last centuries. It twists her lips into a snarl that didn’t seem to quite fit her otherwise neat, almost military appearance.

She gulped in a false breath and let out a bone-rattling, gut-churning scream and Spinarea found herself suddenly very glad of the clotting blood in her ear canals. It muffled the sound of the ghost yelling: “GIDEON!” Even through the blood, she found herself clapping her palms to her head in a way very unbecoming of a nun of the Ninth. The mystery woman shouted the word (a name?) again, and then once more in quick succession, pain and anger and something else mingling in a voice that rattled the walls enough to knock a construct off a bridge above. And then, before anyone could shake the ringing from their head to ask her anything meaningful, the spirit was gone. 

It took Spinarea a few minutes after it left to realize that the infant was crying again. It was a half second after that to realize it must have gotten the lungs from its mother. The crowd had managed to grow while they were battling with the woman’s ghost, by now most of the Ninth house was crowded around the strange tableau. Even the Reverend Father and Mother had shown up, though it didn’t look as though they had joined the ritual after it had started. 

“We didn’t ask her where they’re from,” Magda said from behind the wailing lump against her shoulder, back to stating the obvious. “Where are we going to send the child now?” 

The Reverend Father and Mother said nothing for a long moment while the rest of the gathered congregation looked on. The child in question did not even break the curious, breathless silence. Finally, Lord Priamhark waved a bony hand at the Marshall in a definitive ‘take care of it’ motion. He immediately began muttering figures under his breath, thinking out loud about how much it would cost to raise a child and for how long it would have to be of service to pay it off. At his mumbled “--find it a cot,” Magda looked up, arms still full of a now mostly soothed infant.

“Th--they probably need clothing and a cot and fed, probably a diaper and--” Spinarea cut her off with a sharp hand motion.

“Go take care of it girl,” she said. “You’re dismissed for the rest of the day.” And with that, Magda scampered off, nearly tripping over her own growth spurt-long legs. 

Finally. Blessed, child-free silence. 

If Sister Spinarea could go another two years without drawing teaching duty again, she’d die a happy woman.


End file.
